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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Norman J. McCormick
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 137 | Number 3 | March 2001 | Pages 359-363
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2195
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spherical harmonics (PN) solution at the surface of a source-free half-space is investigated to determine conditions for which exact results can be obtained with an approximation of any odd order N. For isotropic scattering, an exact solution for the net current can be obtained if the incident illumination comes from an isotropic plane source, which extends the observation of Garcia and Siewert that an exact solution for the scalar flux can be obtained if the incident illumination is constant with the cosine of the polar angle. An exact solution for the scalar flux at the interface between two isotropic-scattering, half-space media also can be obtained with a finite N for a spatially uniform source in one half-space.